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Martha Slept Here

Carter Glatt, a sixteen-year-old junior at the Horace Mann School, is lanky, with black hair and long eyelashes. He loves to play sports, especially football and tennis. He speaks in a slightly stiff, respectful manner that suggests that he’s used to conversing with adults. He carries a BlackBerry with a crack down the front. Last summer, he started a business, but he wouldn’t be able to run it if his mother didn’t drive him around.

Glatt’s family owns a weekend house in Southampton (his father is a hedge-fund manager), and one recent Saturday he was sprawled in the back seat of his mother’s Mercedes S.U.V., narrating a tour of the neighborhood for a visitor. “Is Bernie Madoff’s house on there?” he asked himself. “Yup, I think it’s 216 Montauk Highway.” A copy of the Hampton Star Map—Glatt’s creation, which he sells for seven dollars and ninety-five cents—was spread out in front of him.

Glatt got the idea for his map last year, when his family took a trip to Los Angeles and spent a few hours with a Hollywood star map, driving past the houses of some of his favorite celebrities (Tom Cruise, Will Smith). The Hamptons, he decided, could use a star map of their own. “There is such a dense population of celebrities—if you live anywhere out here, you’re living near one of them,” he said.

He did research for the map, and designed it, and, with money that he saved scooping ice cream at MaggieMoo’s, in Southampton, produced two thousand copies. His target customers: tourists, real-estate agents, and anyone who wants to know which of the mansions on Henry Ford II’s former Water Mill estate belongs to Paris Hilton’s parents. “I had to go through the Internet for hours, looking for people’s addresses,” he said. “If I wasn’t a hundred-per-cent positive it was the person’s address, I didn’t put it on the map. For example, Jon Bon Jovi. I believe he’s at Lily Pond and Ocean, but I didn’t want to put him there without a precise address. So he’ll have to be in next year’s edition.”

There are sixty-seven houses on the map. Their owners range from the fashion industry (Tory Burch, Calvin Klein) to the art world (Chuck Close, Julian Schnabel), from literature (E. L. Doctorow, Tom Wolfe) to business (David Koch, George Soros) and entertainment (Steven Spielberg, Russell Simmons), and include at least one person Glatt’s mom had never heard of (Bob Balaban).

The first house on the tour was Candice Bergen’s, which is near Martha Stewart’s place, on Lily Pond Lane, in East Hampton. “Could you go down Egypt Lane, please, Mummy?” Glatt asked. The car stopped in front of a large wooden house partly hidden by a wall of trimmed hedges. “Look how good her privet looks compared to that one,” Mrs. Glatt said, peering out the window. “Do you want to do Further Lane?”

“No, thank you,” Glatt said. “Jerry Seinfeld lives there, but you can’t see his house. The only thing you can see is that he has a baseball diamond.”

The map is printed on glossy paper and has pictures of starfish on it, and Glatt said that he’s sold “a couple of hundred” copies so far. You can buy it online (“I’ve had people from France, England, and Bangladesh check out the Web site”) and at a few stores, but generally it has proved to be a tough sell. Several local business owners told him that they couldn’t carry the map because it might upset their celebrity clients. “And there is definitely a kid factor,” Glatt said. “No one told me, ‘You know, you’re sixteen, I can’t do this.’ But I did get that kind of vibe from some people.”

When asked how he balances his business life with the demands of high school, Glatt said, “I have to find an equilibrium. School is definitely very important to me, and so is this.”

“School is No. 1,” his mother interjected from behind the wheel.

“School is the priority,” Glatt said, correcting himself.

After swinging by the homes of Mel Brooks (“You see him walking on the beach a lot”), Christie Brinkley (“You know she’s here when her umbrellas are up”), and Howard Stern (“The Maserati’s in”), it was time to head back. For next year’s edition, Glatt is working on finding a sponsor to buy an ad on the back. He has big plans. “One day, I’d like to own the New York Mets,” he said. “Even if it’s a minority stake.” (He took a sports-management class at Georgetown over the summer.) “I’d love to reach that point in my life where I could say, ‘I have the New York Mets.’ That would be cool.” ♦